


life is far too short to scream and shout

by rarmaster



Series: YWKON [4]
Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: F/M, XC2 AU, YWKON, and also one really needy makeout session, anna has some ~bad rsd~, apologies reunions and OH so much guilt, excpet there is no god only him now, kratos despite everything; horny on main, kratos like hey god. how the FUCK do i cope with this bs, kratos that is not a healthy coping mechanism, slowburn of a sort, tfw 15yrs is a longass time but also both these assholes are immortal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:47:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21888382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarmaster/pseuds/rarmaster
Summary: so kiss me, kiss meor: after fifteen years of separation, Kratos and Anna Figure Things Out(YWKON)
Relationships: Anna & Kratos Aurion & Lloyd Irving, Anna Irving/Kratos Aurion
Series: YWKON [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1222385
Kudos: 7





	life is far too short to scream and shout

**Author's Note:**

> title from lifeboats by snow patrol bc it's fucking me up
> 
> uhhh this wasn't supposed to take 20k but oops? the sequel to [_everything comes back, in turn_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17252078) that we didn't know we needed, but since lloyd got to fuss out his Feelings Re: Anna in ywkon2 and kratos... never did on screen, i had to remedy that
> 
> shoutout to aera who let me scream endlessly into her DMs about this, i really appreciate that,

Honestly, it still feels a little bit like a dream. Everything about the past two weeks has been something like a dream to Kratos, truthfully—a very bad one, at times—but specifically, right now? Sitting on Anna’s bed in the very-nice rooms Tethe’alla provided her, watching her every movement as she hums aimlessly and gets dressed for bed? Not even meeting the Architect felt like as much of a dream as this does. It’s been so long that he’s forgotten that her voice cracks when she tries to hit high notes, or maybe that’s something new, new like the way her right arm hangs uselessly at her side and she uses her left hand and only her left hand to open drawers and rummage through them. He wonders if he’s going to get used to seeing her, here, alive. He wonders if he’s going to stop being afraid that she’s going to vanish when he blinks.

He knows that he will, eventually. But it still took him weeks to get used to Martel being alive and not dead, and he’s only had a bare handful of hours with Anna, not all of which he got to spend within the same room as her.

So, for now—who can blame him for watching her like she’s the only light in the room? Who can blame him for taking in every detail he didn’t think he would need to memorize fifteen years ago? Who can blame him for wanting to indulge in every second he has with her?

( _A part of him wants to say she really doesn’t have to bother with clothes, but he can’t get his mouth to say it before she’s finished pulling her shirt down over her head._ )

Anna turns to look at him, again, and stops humming, stops everything, for a split second. She blinks a few times, like she’s surprised to see him, before she smiles, crooked, and laughs short and nervous. Kratos is relieved, in a way, that it’s not just him who isn’t used to this. Another part of him, small and quiet, sings a bitter song about how _she_ didn’t think he was _dead_ , so she’s unused to this in completely different ways for completely different reasons, but he stubbornly shuts it up.

“You’re gonna stay here, then?” Anna asks, in a tone Kratos can’t quite read. The distracted, _oh-I-just-remembered_ way she moves to turn off the light in the corner of the room halfway through asking her question is familiar, though.

“If that’s alright,” Kratos says, because he _will_ leave if she wants him to, knowing full well that his presence is a distraction she probably doesn’t need, given the whole important-meeting-regarding-the-peace-treaty-and-ending-the-war thing she has going on tomorrow, but. “I don’t really want to be anywhere else.”

Anna laughs again, short and—somewhat pained, Kratos thinks. Her shoulders hunch, and she spends a second too long with her back to him. “Yeah, that’s… fair,” she says, slowly, quietly. “That’s…” But she loses the trail before she finishes that sentence, or maybe just decides she doesn’t want to say it. Kratos can’t judge her for that. She hesitates there for much too long, though, still refusing to look at him. Kratos can hear her thoughts spinning from here.

“Anna?” he asks, gentle. When she finally looks at him, he presses: “I _can_ go, if you want me to.”

“No,” she says, quickly. “No, no, I don’t mind, I just—" She takes a step towards the bed, stops before she climbs into it, hands pressed against the mattress as she stares at him, weighs him. “Are you _sure_?” she asks, and he thinks that there’s something in her eyes that sings of more than their usual routine, like this is about more than simply checking to make sure he’s okay with touch, maybe her trying to ask if he’s okay with _this,_ with _them_.

The thing is, his answer doesn’t change, either way.

It’s still yes.

Resoundingly, unshakingly, _yes._

( _Maybe he should be mad at her. But right now all he cares about is the fact that she’s alive, right now all he knows is that the answer to the way his soul aches for her isn’t to leave this room, to force more distance. And maybe that’s selfish, maybe that’s wrong, but._ )

Kratos jerks his head for her to join him. “Come here,” he says. “I’m sure.”

He watches Anna swallow. Watches her hesitate. But—the thing about Anna, is that she never hesitates for long. ( _He’s the only thing she ever hesitates with, and that’s just because she’s trying to be careful, which he appreciates, because so few people are actually careful with him.)_ So it’s only a few seconds before she decides she trusts him, trusts his judgement, and hoists herself up onto the bed, all of her weight distributed to her good arm as she crosses the distance between them. She plops down next to him, snuggling up to his side and Kratos _breathes,_ relieved by how solid, how real her warmth is.

“Missed you,” Anna mumbles, her face buried in his bicep, and Kratos laughs, tries not to feel the pain of that loss, that _longing,_ too deeply.

“Me too,” he whispers, dislodging her just long enough for him to wrap his arm around her, pull her close. She doesn’t quite melt _all_ the way into it, some kind of distance wedged between them after these fifteen years, but the fact she’s in his arms at all is enough for Kratos, right now.

He sends a sidelong look at her, curious and ultimately disappointed by how high-collared her shirt is. Normally she’s impossible to get out of V-necks—not that Kratos minds, of course. The view’s always nice. Still.

He tugs at the edges of the offending shirt in question. “Not really your style,” he remarks.

“Oh,” Anna says. “It’s, uh.”

“Borrowed one of Malos’?” Kratos guesses, even though he doesn’t think it’s _quite_ big enough. It’s definitely too big for Anna, but… only barely.

“No, it’s uh. Yours, actually,” Anna says, kind of quickly.

“Oh, I don’t even recognize it.” Kratos laughs, light, considering the shirt again. He can’t remember ever owning it, though he supposes it’s not _that_ dissimilar to the shirt he’s wearing now.

“Haha, yeah, well,” Anna says. _Oh._ She’s embarrassed, is she?

“Missed me that much, huh?” Kratos presses, mostly just wanting to see her flustered.

“Shut up.” Anna turns her head away too fast for him to see if she’s blushing, but it’s more than enough to tell him she is, in fact, flustered, which is all he really wanted out of this. He likes it when she’s flustered. “It. Smelled like you, alright,” she continues, voice tight. “I mean it- It doesn’t, um- Do that anymore. But. It used to. And then I just—Yeah. Yeah.”

She’s clearly embarrassed, but Kratos kind of likes that. He likes her honesty, too. The fact she missed him at all fills his core with warmth that both eases and sharpens the ache of her absence in his chest, but he tries to hold onto the warmth and not the pain. He thinks for a moment about teasing: if she missed him that much, she shouldn’t have stayed away—but that sits too close to the ache, and besides, maybe it’s too mean.

“We can trade shirts, if you’d like,” Kratos offers, instead. Meanwhile, he slides his hand up and under her shirt so his fingers can grace her bare skin. Anna squirms, just a little.

“You just want me out of this one.”

“Guilty as charged.”

Anna laughs, delighted and exasperated all at once. “What am I supposed to do with you,” she asks, leaning affectionally into his side. Kratos drinks in the pressure, the warmth, the way she drags her fingers up his thigh. How solid she is is a promise. And it makes it easier to forget about the weight on his shoulders, in his head, hanging around his neck; the Architect’s locket a constant, grim reminder of something he’d rather not remember at all.

“Indulge me?” Kratos pleads, quiet.

Anna looks up at him, eyebrows raised, but try as she might she can’t keep the quirk of a smile off of her lips. She sighs, all dramatics, and Kratos grins slowly, relieved. “Fine,” Anna says. “But you’re going to have to help, a little. I’ve only got one hand.”

Kratos doesn’t mind this at all, but he has to rib: “You managed to get dressed just fine, and I would assume getting undressed is easier.”

“Myself, yes,” Anna says. “You? No.” Then she grins, winning and eager. “Besides, maybe I _want_ you to undress me.”

She’s absolutely _shameless,_ but honestly Kratos loves that. Every ounce of his fondness and how much it hurt to _not have this_ bubbles out of his core as a laugh in his throat, a little desperate as his hands find the hem of her shirt and start tugging it upward. Anna laughs along with him, but there’s an edge underneath it—Kratos tries to think about his knuckles brushing Anna’s skin instead, and actually does need most of his brainspace to help her get her shirt all the way off, because it gets caught on her dead arm for a moment.

“Sorry,” she says once the shirt is off, running her left hand through her hair in attempt to fix it, even though it’s always messy.

“Don’t be,” Kratos says. He tosses the shirt haphazardly onto the floor, knowing she won’t care and—it’s his shirt, anyway, and he doesn’t care, either. After that, though, he pauses, considering Anna. She hasn’t moved an inch, still sitting on her knees, barely near Kratos at all. Something’s wrong. “Anna?” he asks.

He hears her swallow. “Are you… really, _really_ sure about this?” she asks.

Kratos does his best to drag his eyes back up to her face. Her expression is… troubled, apologetic. He blinks a few times. “About… what?” he asks in return, confused. Actually, he can probably guess what’s bothering her, but that the fifteen-year gap in their relationship is weighing on her more than it is on him is something of a surprise.

“About, I mean.” Anna fidgets where she sits, still needing to dispel a well of pent-up energy she’s always had. “Us?”

That’s what Kratos thought. Still, his answer is the same: “Of course I am,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know, the whole _didn’t-contact-you-for-fifteen-years_ fuckup??”

“You’re here now.”

“Yeah, but…”

Anna grimaces, tight, gripping her right arm with her left hand and running her fingers obsessively up and down her wrist. Clearly, that’s not enough for her. It’s enough for Kratos—at least for right now. There’s that pain in his core, a touch of bitterness that probably needs to be addressed, that they should talk about, but Kratos doesn’t _want to,_ not tonight.

“Anna,” he says, gentle. “That’s all that matters to me, right now. That’s all I care about. I’m just happy you’re alive, and…” The words catch in his mouth, for a moment, but he plows ahead even as he feels his face catch fire, because he’s not going to get it if he doesn’t ask. “Quite honestly, I just want you to fuck me so hard I forget about literally everything else for a little while.”

All the embarrassment is well worth watching Anna’s expression the exact moment she processes his words. Her eyes widen, her mouth widening into an O, and then she hastily shoves a knuckle in her mouth and bites down on it before she turns away. She inhales sharply, releases it in a shaky: “Hoooooo, oh, holy _shit_ ,” which is somewhat muffled by the knuckle still in her mouth. She takes another deep breath, then stops biting down on her knuckle. “Oh, _Architect,_ ” she says,

And Kratos’ heart stops.

The locket on his chest weighs so heavy it might as well be trying to push him directly into the floor.

It seems Anna realizes what has just transpired the same moment he does, at least. “Oh, fuck, that’s—” she laughs, nervous and empty. “That’s… weird to say, now. Considering…”

She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t need to. Kratos knows.

“That’s precisely what I’d like to forget about,” he says.

Anna turns to him, pained and sympathetic all at once. “Yeah I… can’t blame you,” she tells him. She still doesn’t move any closer to him. “But I- I can’t, Kratos. I can’t. Sex isn’t…” She can’t find the words, so she shakes her head instead. “Not tonight.”

Kratos hums, somewhat disappointed, but a no is a no. So: “That’s fine,” he says.

“We can still cuddle,” Anna promises, crawling back over to him and plopping against his side. “If you think that’ll help.”

“Is kissing on or off the table?” Kratos asks.

Anna hums. Sits up a little bit so she can study his face. Kratos waits, lets her think it over.

( _The thing is…_ _Anna finds it hard to say no, to a needy and clearly touch-starved Kratos. She finds it hard to not want to indulge him. And she doesn’t mind indulging him, really, doesn’t mind making him feel good—that’s the least she owes him, right? She’s too wound up in her guilt to enjoy sex, but the rest…_

 _She can do that._ )

“You want me to kiss you?” Anna says, instead of simply saying yes.

Kratos isn’t sure if she’s just asking or if she wants to hear him beg, but he kind of likes how she responds when he does, so: “Until I can’t breathe,” he says, and enjoys the sharp little noise of stifled delight she makes as her eyes go wide again and she bites her lip.

Sucking in her breath and grinning, Anna backs up a little bit and says: “Well let’s get you out of that shirt, then, and—” Her grin falters, a little, replaced by what _looks_ like frustration. “ _Honestly_ , Kratos,” she scolds, light, crossing the last distance between them and reaching her hands behind his neck. For the locket’s clasp, he realizes after a moment. “If you want to forget about the things that are haunting you then you need to stop wearing them around your— _fuck shit_ I can’t get the clasp undone.”

Kratos laughs shortly at her misery, though her words have stirred something uncomfortable in his soul.

“Dramatic moment _ruined_ thanks to my dead hand,” Anna moans, sitting back and dropping her hands. “ _You_ take the locket off, then. You don’t need it.”

Kratos shifts his weight, just slightly, eyes narrowed with his discomfort. He’s walking a tightrope, or maybe on the beach of a stormy sea, one foot submerged in the restless waters that threaten to pull him under any second but even if he were to move further up the shore his guilt would catch up to him in place of the uncomfortable horror. The knowledge that he is a reflection of the man they all once called god is knowledge that no man should have to bear, but doesn’t he have to bear it, anyway? Does he really have the choice not to? And the locket—

“ _Kratos_ ,” Anna presses.

He sighs and reaches up to take it off. Regardless of his thoughts and why he’s kept it, he doesn’t want it reminding him of all that right _now_ , anyway, so…

“I cannot believe you changed into your pajamas and _still_ kept it on,” Anna says, snatching it from him the moment it’s off his neck. She turns it over in her hands, scowling. “Honestly, you should just get rid of it.”

“I can’t do that,” Kratos protests. He can’t. “That would be—” Despite everything, Kratos wants the proof. That what the Architect said to him, up there, was true and not some kind of fever dream. Proof that the words were said at all. But articulating that is just going to start something he doesn’t want to start right now, because right now he doesn’t want to be thinking about this at _all_ , so what he says instead is: “ _Rude_.”

Anna sneers. “Architect’s dead, he can’t give a shit about you being rude to his memory.”

“Well, I do.”

Anna continues glaring at him. “Well, you can keep the locket without _wearing it all the time,_ Kratos,” she argues, and before he can quite get a protest out, she’s climbing out of bed and taking the locket across the room. She opens a drawer of her dresser and drops it in, then slams the dresser shut. “There, now you can forget about it,” she declares, making a show of dusting her hands off expressly for dramatic emphasis.

“Anna…” Kratos protests.

“You _don’t need it_ ,” she insists. “It’s fucking you up! Besides, you said you _wanted_ to forget about—all that bullshit, right? So now it’s out of sight, out of mind.”

Kratos sighs. She’s right, on all fronts, so there’s no point digging in his heels.

“You’re right,” he says.

Anna’s expression and all her stubbornness softens, either with pity or because she’s glad he gave in. Kratos doesn’t mind, either way. He asked her for a distraction. He can’t get mad at her for giving him one.

“Come on,” Anna says, gentle, as she climbs back into the bed. Her hand trails up his leg as she does, and Kratos sucks air into his mouth as his chest clenches with the touch. “You wanted me to kiss you silly, right? Take your shirt off so I can reach your core crystal.”

 _That_ particular promise makes Kratos’ ether boil with anticipation, and he shivers as he does as told. He tosses this shirt on the floor with the other one, and once it’s out of the way, Anna starts to crawl into his lap. But she hesitates before she touches him, as she always does, even though—“I’m fine,” Kratos insists, impatient, before she can ask. He likes that she asks, he really does, but right now he cannot bear another second of her not touching him, so he grabs her hands and pulls her closer. Anna laughs, at least, her smile bright.

“Okay, okay,” she says, and crawls into his lap properly, straddling his hips. Kratos hums, delighted, his heart skipping a beat or three in his chest. Anna laughs again, short and cute, her hands tracing the ether lines up his arms. “You’re—needy, holy shit.”

Kratos could ask how she expects otherwise of him, because how can he be anything but, after fifteen years, after thinking she was dead and suddenly discovering she isn’t? It still feels somewhat dreamlike. Everything that’s happening to him right now is something he’d had to recognize and accept was _never going to happen again._ He’d had to come to terms with the fact he was never going to hear her laugh or see the gleam in her dark eyes or appreciate the way her hair falls constantly disheveled into her face. He was never going to feel the warmth of her skin or her weight in his lap again, was never going to watch her watch him, loving and hungry all at once, and he had grieved the loss of all this and the loss of her, but _here she is now._

Here she is now.

It’s too much to say, more than his mind can articulate for his mouth to put into words, especially when he doesn’t want to be _talking_ right now, so instead all he does is raise his eyebrows and, hands on her hips, pull her closer as he says: “Anna.”

Just her name, nothing more, but she understands. She always does.

“Okay, okay,” she says again. It’s like she has two modes, bold and nervous with no in-between. She’s nervous, now, but her left hand—her good hand—runs up his neck to cup his face while her bad hand clings uselessly to his shoulder. She ducks down, and brings her lips to his.

It’s the first time they’ve kissed in fifteen years.

It’s not perfect, of course. They’re both fifteen years out of practice, so it’s fumbling and awkward as they relearn how their mouths fit together, as they remember how exactly the other likes to be kissed. Kratos drinks in every second of it anyway, drinks it in because he thought he never would again. He’s glad that Anna was willing to indulge him. He’s glad she’s here at all.

“Kratos…” she says, soft, into his mouth, and Kratos chokes on the air in his throat. It’s still somewhat dreamlike, all of this, and he wishes it wasn’t.

He pulls her closer. Focuses instead on relearning every inch of her he forgot, all while she returns the favor. His fingers scrape against her skin as he reacquaints himself with the texture of it, reacquaints himself with the taste of her jaw in his mouth, as she reacquaints herself with every divot of his skin, every scar, every ether line, her fingers roaming roaming _roaming,_ like she intends to make a map and he is both her canvas and her object of study.

She runs kisses down his jawline, and he arches into it, memorizing the warmth and the pressure of her knee pressed flush against his hip, where her leg graces his side, toes against his thigh, his shoulder in the crook of her elbow, her hand on his bicep, _her lips on his core crystal_. He commits to memory every inch where their skin meets in the spaces of thought he has to him. It feels less like a dream, now. He clings to her, gratefully drowning in the stuttering perfect joy she’s pressing into his core with every kiss. Anna hums deep and content, clearly enjoying how easy and thoroughly her touches are undoing him, all while Kratos’ breath catches on the sensation of being held more tenderly than anyone else has ever held him, and how beautiful and wonderful it is, _how much he missed it_.

True to her word, Anna holds him down and kisses him until he’s breathless, though she goes about in a slightly different way than Kratos had anticipated. Not that he minds. How could he mind the sensation of her lips on his core, the blinding heat and the way his mind blurs completely under it? It’s perfect, and beautiful, and he gratefully loses himself to it. He’s not sure when exactly she lets him up, because it’s still a few moments after that before he’s fully coherent.

“Missed you,” he manages, when he can breathe again.

Anna laughs, tight and edging a little close to guilty, which is something of a damper on how Kratos is blissfully not thinking about any of his worries at the precise moment. Anna turns her head and tucks it into the crook of his neck, and the way she presses her forehead into his skin says all that her words couldn’t.

He doesn’t want her to worry about it, right now, doesn’t want to _think_ about it. He turns his own head with the intent to kiss her, but gives up when it’d take more maneuvering than he actually wants to do at the precise moment, still lethargic in his afterglow. The press of his jaw against her forehead is enough. He inhales, deeply, savoring it, savoring all of this.

Anna’s hands—never idle—trace his ether lines up his arm then down his side, slow and gentle and electrifying all at once, pausing only when her fingers reach his hip, which is where she loses the trail because he’s still wearing his pants. She drags her fingers across his stomach instead, finding the ether lines there and tracing them up, skipping over the scar on his chest with such practice that it’s almost like it hasn’t been fifteen years since they last did this. She stops with her fingers on his core crystal, her touch warm and _good,_ and he relaxes under it, even as she tenses.

“’m sorry…” she whispers, burying her face further into Kratos’ skin.

Arms wrapped around her, he pulls her tighter to him, scowling a little.

“Not now,” he says.

She takes a shaky breath that becomes a little laugh—desperate, full of emotion which Kratos doesn’t think sounds like joy. She presses a kiss to his neck. “I love you,” she says, instead.

“Better.”

“…do you still love me?” she asks, and it’s not nervous, but it’s kind of small, and that laugh accompanies it again, self-depreciating, like she doesn’t believe he’ll say yes.

Which makes it all the more important that he lifts her chin with his hand and meets her eyes when he says: “Of course I do.” He runs his fingers up her face, tucks her hair behind her ear. “It’s not like I ever stopped.”

Anna’s smile is wide and bitter all at once, her shoulders shaking with her desperation. “Don’t think I deserve that,” she mumbles, as she turns her head away again, unable to bear his sincerity. He sighs, soft, and presses a kiss to her hair. Her hands have gone very still against his skin, which is unusual for her. “Just—How are you _okay_ with—”

“Later,” Kratos interrupts, pressing their foreheads together, hand on the back of her head to pull her close. Maybe she doesn’t deserve this. Maybe he doesn’t care. “We can unpack all of that later. Right now I just want to know I’m not dreaming.”

Anna laughs, shaky. “Fuck,” she says. “Okay.”

And she kisses him, full and deep, every inch of her pressed up against him like she’s trying to make up for it all. Kratos relishes in it, in the taste of her passion and fervency, in the act of relearning a taste he thought he’d never get to taste again, bursting with his relief and happiness, pulling her ever closer. She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s _alive._

For him, that’s enough.

\- - -

Something tugs at the edges of Kratos’ consciousness for his attention, and in his sleep he scowls, because this is a rather nice dream that he does not particularly want to see end. But the voice persists, and begrudgingly Kratos’ mind works its way towards wakefulness. Kratos braces himself for disappointment, and grief, but when he blinks his eyes open, his face is still pressed into the bare of Anna’s back, right between her shoulder blades.

He wasn’t dreaming.

Kratos blinks a few more times, disappointment giving way to shock and relief and longing, all of them boiling hot and persistent in his core. He closes his eyes and presses his forehead against Anna’s skin, breathing deeply in the smell of her, the _reality_ of her. His right arm is still draped around her, rising and falling as her chest does, slow and deep because she is still sleeping, but undoubtedly undeniably _alive_ and _here._ His left arm is starting to feel all tingly from having slept on it all night, but he doesn’t mind so much, not at the moment.

“Hey, Kratos?” calls that voice again, cautious.

Kratos lifts his head up. Malos smiles apologetically from where he stands at the end of the bed.

“Hate to wake you,” Malos says, though the caution is edging out of his tone, giving way to fond reluctance. “But I gotta wake Anna, and if I tried to do that right now she’s just gonna elbow you in the face.” He laughs, short and nervous, just like Anna does. “Didn’t think you’d appreciate that.”

It takes a second for Kratos to get his voice working, but mornings are usually like that. “…I wouldn’t,” Kratos admits.

Maybe he should say something else, but he gets distracted, studying Anna’s face as she sleeps. The fact that she’s here at all steals all the air from Kratos’ lungs. He knows he’s not dreaming, because she’s solid and real in the way his dreams are not, but he kind of wants to pinch himself anyway, just to make sure. Instead he lifts his hand to brush Anna’s hair out of her eyes and tuck it back behind her ear, even though he knows it’s not going to stay there long. A smile tugs on his lips, core filled to bursting with how much he loves her, how happy he is right now.

He’s almost forgotten about everything else up until Malos clears his throat.

“Guess you can wake her up, if you want,” Malos says, once he has Kratos’ attention. “She’s just…” And here he pauses, grimacing, like he’s trying to figure out how to phrase it without insulting his daughter but can’t come up with any words.

Kratos laughs. “I remember,” he says. And he does. Even if most of his memories of Anna are only just resurfacing after being buried in his grief, it’d be difficult to forget how slow mornings are with her, how she fights waking up just as much as she fights falling asleep to begin with. “I can handle it, though. When does she need to be up?”

“If she ain’t in the shower in like, half an hour, she won’t have time for breakfast which she _will_ regret despite what she’ll try and tell you,” Malos answers, and Kratos laughs again.

“Noted,” he says. “I got it.”

Once Malos is gone, Kratos shifts and buries his face in the crook of Anna’s neck, nuzzling her skin. She’s ticklish here, he knows, which is why he’s doing it. She squirms a little under him, mumbling something nonsensical as her brain fires but not enough to fully wake her. Kratos laughs, fond, tilts his head to kiss up her jaw. His legs are still tangled with hers, and while it isn’t quite the roaring pleasure of skin on skin ( _he’s still wearing pants, even if hers are short enough she might as well not be_ ) the pressure and warmth of it is something Kratos enjoys, nonetheless. Just another reminder that she’s real.

( _He’s somewhat sure, after last night, that she wants him to be mad._

 _But how can he be, when she is not a ghost but solid in his arms?_ )

Anna stirs a little more aggressively under the pressure of Kratos’ lips against her jaw, a noise rumbling in the back of her throat that lands somewhere between _five-more-minutes_ and something dangerously close to _desire_. Kratos’ breath catches, something in his gut ( _or maybe a little lower_ ) responding to the sound. He spends a very tense moment completely still with his mouth still pressed to the underside of Anna’s jaw, trying to catch his breath again.

“Anna,” he sings into her skin, gentle but needling. “Good morning.”

“Noooo,” she whines, which doesn’t mean she’s _awake,_ but means Kratos is at least getting somewhere.

He shifts his weight, distributing it all on his arms on either side of her, in part so that she can move without elbowing him too drastically, in part so he can see what he’s doing a little better. This has the perks of being able to actually kiss her on the lips—which he does, briefly—but the downsides of distracting him once he sees the scars on her skin again. It’s much easier to take in the severity of them in the morning’s light, comparatively to the dimness of the night before. The scars stand pale against her brown skin, a spiderweb that mirrors the damaged ether channels on Malos’ body. It’s not _just_ her right arm, either. The entire right side of her body, or at least, from the spot where half of Malos’ core crystal sits in her collarbone to her abdomen, is touched by the scars. They even trail up to her chin, getting lost only where the hair on her skin is a little bit thicker there.

She told him last night amidst how feverishly he was kissing them that they don’t _hurt,_ not anymore ( _in fact, she said that all feeling in her damaged skin is kind of hit or miss_ ), but Kratos wonders how much the wounds themselves hurt to begin with. Probably a lot. Kratos knows what ether burns feel like, and though all of his burns ( _either from the strain of wielding both Aegises or from before, from Kvar,_ ) healed well enough that he never scarred, that the ether channels were never permanently damaged, receiving them was still painful. And if the Aegis’ ether burns as badly as it does when channeled willingly…

How much more does the Architect’s ether burn, when gifted to an unwitting blade?

Kratos’ fingers curl on the bedsheets, holding them tightly for a moment as he tries to breathe.

The Architect could have very will killed Anna and Malos both.

But Kratos knows—of course he knows, because he and the Architect are the same person, or at least echoes of each other—that simply allowing her to die without trying to save her would have been much too worse to bear.

He’s not wearing the locket, but he feels its weight regardless.

He kisses Anna’s skin again so he doesn’t have to think about it. “Anna,” he presses, a little louder, as he trails his mouth up her neck and to her lips again. “Anna, come on. You need to wake up.”

All of a sudden Anna goes dangerously still, and Kratos immediately stops touching her any more than he has to as to not lose his balance. She’s rigid below him, eyes snapping open as her brain pumps adrenaline through her veins, because that’s what brains like theirs _do_ when they have spent too long sleeping in unfamiliar beds, too long afraid of who exactly might be waking them up.

“Anna,” Kratos says, gently. “It’s just me.”

Recognition lights in her eyes.

“Oh,” she says, blinking a few times at him like she’s surprised to see him at all. “It’s just you,” she repeats.

“You seem surprised,” Kratos says, raising his eyebrows at her, fond but curious, mostly just wanting to tease.

“Not used to it being you,” Anna mumbles, groaning a little, apparently still groggy despite the adrenaline, as she rolls onto her back. She blinks blearily against the remnants of sleep, then abruptly her eyes go wide. “I mean! Like! I’m not used to it being you because you haven’t—been here. Not because. Like it’s not like I’ve fucked anyone else, I wouldn’t cheat on you, that was probably really obvious though, I don’t know why I, I just didn’t want you to think…?”

She’s rambling, and based on her expression she’s well aware she’s rambling, and Kratos could say something to interject but instead he just leans down and kisses her instead to cut her off. It’s a much longer kiss than he intended it to be, which isn’t _entirely_ his fault. Anna deepened the kiss immediately, either eager or just as an apology, not that Kratos cares much either way. It’s strange and a little electrifying, partly because their current positions are reversed from their normal, partly because being this close to Anna at all makes him dizzy, and that kiss didn’t help matters. Every inch of him is alight with desire and how much he _missed her_ , how glad he is to have her in his arms again, and maybe now isn’t a good time, but…

Once she lets him up Kratos immediately turns his head and presses a kiss to her jaw instead, hoping to a god he never believed in that he can keep his voice from cracking and taking his resolve with it as he says: “You know, going fifteen years without fucking anyone sounds like a real hardship…”

“I- holy _shit,_ Kratos,” Anna swears, but she laughs and arches into his touch like she craves it. “You better not be taking this where I think you are.”

“I’m just saying,” Kratos says into the skin of her neck, his face hot but wanting it too badly to let himself back out. “I think we have time to fix that right now, if we wanted…”

Anna groans, definitely frustrated, but in the way that lands closer to just being mad she’s turned on than actually being upset. She squirms a little away from him, but not with any real effort. “I can’t, I can’t,” she whines. “I have a _meeting_.”

“If we’re quick…” Kratos argues.

Anna scoffs. “We’re _fifteen years_ out of practice, I don’t think there’s going to be anything quick about that,” she says.

“Mm, speak for yourself.”

“I— _Architect,_ ” Anna swears, and quite suddenly the pleasantly warm and kind of urgent pressure in Kratos’ gut just isn’t there anymore. Maybe he tenses, or maybe Anna merely realizes her words, because she flinches and immediately: “ _Fuck,_ fuck,” she says. “Sorry. It’s—just habit, you know? Slips out.”

Kratos rolls off of her, sits on the bed. “It’s fine,” he says.

Anna pushes herself up enough to give him a _look,_ knowing and judging and pitying all at once, probably as it occurs to her that the whole Architect business is bothering him so much that simply hearing the name can steal all the joy out of Kratos’ lungs.

“Kratos…” she begins, but Kratos isn’t _mad,_ he’s just wishing he didn’t exist on this plane of existence anymore, or that he knew of a way to wipe his memories.

“Really, it is,” he assures her. “Besides, your meeting is more important…”

“A little,” Anna admits, sitting up the rest of the way. She cautiously reaches a hand up towards his head, and he leans towards it in silent permission, breathing deeply as she runs fingers through his hair, tucking strands behind his ear. “Maybe it’s a good thing I thoughtlessly killed your boner, though.” She leans in to kiss him on the lips, brief, then flashes him a smile that’s both playful and hungry. “Means I can take my time with you, later.”

The words make Kratos shiver, but don’t quite bring him back to the warm, content arousal he was feeling earlier. “That… would be nice,” he admits.

Anna grins, and that’s when Kratos sees the underlying guilt in her smile, burning in her dark eyes. She pulls away from him before he can comment, though—not that he would know what to say—sliding off the bed. “You wanna come with?” she asks, as she starts looking for clothes. “Not—not in the shower, I mean, but like. To the meeting. No one would mind you being there. And it could… A distraction, you know?”

Kratos shakes his head. “Pass,” he says, though he appreciates her worrying about him, appreciates her attempting to provide him with distractions even if she can’t give him the one he wants ( _though he wants it significantly less now than he did two minutes ago_ ).

“You sure?” Anna presses, mostly just curious and not really judging, which he’s always liked about her.

Kratos nods. “I hate being around human politicians,” he answers. Literally the only place he can think of worse than being in a room filled to the brim with them is locked up in a cage. He thinks about saying that, because Anna would appreciate the humor, even if it’s a little grim, but doesn’t quite get the words out of his mouth before Anna’s laughing, bright and fond.

“You know what? That’s fair,” she says. “Honestly I don’t like them much either, but the current rulers are both okay, at least. Probably because they’re young.” Kratos starts to argue that it’s not like Anna’s much older—in fact, when they met Hugo, he looked to be about the same age as Anna—only to remember that Anna hasn’t physically aged for the past twenty years.

( _Quietly, selfishly, he’s grateful for that. He doesn’t have any concrete memories of doing it, but he knows in his core that watching your driver—or any human you know—grow old without you is one of the largest griefs a blade can carry. Honestly, he’s quite glad part of his own core crystal sits in Lloyd’s chest, for the same reason._ )

“You know, in hindsight,” Anna laughs, a bundle of clothes clutched in her hands, hip resting against her dresser as she looks at Kratos and talks. “I’m not sure how I ever actually was bitter about you not stopping the war for good the first time. Four blades, trying to talk humanity down? Of course that didn’t work.”

“It is difficult being a diplomat when you are quite certain that every human in the room would stab you in the back and then steal your core crystal once you were dead just to continue their war,” Kratos admits, his tone as light as he can manage. Anna laughs with him, though her laughter and smile both are sad.

She hums. “I think I’ve told you before, but I do feel really bad about how much I was in your grill about it. You not ending the war, you know.”

“You only really whined for the first couple of months you knew me,” Kratos counters.

“I wasn’t whining!!” Anna protests, all bluster and no real bite.

Kratos laughs. “What I’m trying to say is that you _did_ stop bothering me about it once you got to know me better, so… I didn’t really mind.”

Anna’s still pouting a little, but she nods, slow and thoughtful. “Yeah, I guess after a while I figured out you were coming from a place that wasn’t just jaded, but also a little…” She hesitates, here, and Kratos watches her brain switch tracks, find a new train of thought and a better set of words to steer it. “I mean, it wasn’t really smart, to have expected you to end the war, anyway. It wasn’t a safe choice for any of you, at the time. And you aren’t humanity’s babysitters…”

“Neither are you.”

“Hey, I’m human,” Anna argues, her smile sad but proud. “I gotta take _some_ responsibility.”

“Not… really,” Kratos says, though he loves her for caring, loves her for trying all the same.

“Well it would be a waste of ten years of law school if I didn’t bother, so yeah, I do,” Anna counters, and her tone says that’s it, that’s final, which Kratos isn’t about to argue with. The fact that Anna pushes herself off of the dresser then with a sharp: “Anyway! I need to go shower so I’m not fucking late to my meeting!” helps him decide not to.

“Love you,” he calls after her, as she moves towards the door. “Knock ‘em dead.”

“Oh, _absolutely_.”

And then Anna slides out the door, because for as fancy as this suite is, for _some_ reason the bathroom isn’t connected to any of the bedrooms, which is a real flaw in its design, if you ask Kratos. Kratos stares at the closed door for a long moment, his thoughts nowhere specific, it just taking him a while to actually work up the energy to move, let alone decide what he’s going to _do._ He supposes, though, that as much as he honestly does just want to hole himself up in Anna’s room for the rest of the day, that might be a little bit unhealthy, never mind rude to the rest of his companions. And probably not fair to Lloyd, either.

So Kratos slides off the bed and picks a shirt up from off the floor. Not the one he was wearing yesterday, but the one Anna was. It’s a light purple, instead of white, and it’s worn thin with its age. Kratos holds it up to his face and breathes in. Smells like Anna. He pulls it on over his head, debates digging pants out of his bag—a small thing tucked into the corner of the room, since he’s been traveling for a while and there wasn’t room for more changes of clothes than absolutely necessary—then decides against it. Unless he intends on leaving the suite, there’s really no reason he _can’t_ lounge around in his pajama pants.

That decision made, Kratos crosses the room and curiously opens the top drawer of Anna’s dresser. The fact that she’s been here long enough she’s actually unpacked enough to fill it—though, meagerly, with hardly a weeks’ worth of clothes that she must be alternating—is something of a surprise, but not what Kratos is looking for. The locket. She _did_ put it in this drawer last night, didn’t she…?

But rummaging around and shifting clothes doesn’t turn the locket up. Kratos checks the other drawers, but has no luck there either. Did Anna… _seriously_ take it to the shower with her? Just to keep it away from him?

Kratos isn’t sure if he’s frustrated or fond, to be honest.

He doesn’t get the chance to decide which before there’s a knock on the door.

“Hey, Kratos?” comes Malos’ voice. “You decent?”

Kratos chuckles to himself. He supposes it’s a good thing Malos asked, because there was a very real chance he might not have been, had only things gone a little differently fifteen minutes ago. He slides the dresser drawer shut ( _even if Anna_ is _his wife, rummaging through her clothes is still not a thing he wants her dad seeing him doing_ ) and calls: “Yeah, come in.”

He turns towards Malos opening the door, raising his eyebrows. “Anna forget something?” he asks, taking a guess.

For a moment, Malos looks confused. “What? Oh, no,” he says. “I actually, uh, wanted to talk to you, if that’s alright.”

“Oh,” Kratos says.

He must hesitate longer than he thinks he does, because it’s long enough for Malos to raise his eyebrows, his tone gentle as he presses: “ _Is_ that alright?”

Kratos has no real reason to say it isn’t. And he certainly isn’t _opposed_ to conversation, just unprepared for it, and nervous as he always is when it comes to interaction with people he doesn’t normally interact with. ( _Malos should be an exception, but the gulf of fifteen years sits differently between them than it did between Kratos and Anna._ ) Since ultimately there isn’t a reason to say no: “Yes, I suppose so,” Kratos says.

“You sure?” Malos asks, and only when Kratos nods does Malos close the door behind him for privacy.

Kratos moves and sits back down on Anna’s bed, all his weight on it and his ankles loosely crossed against the mattress. Malos takes one of the chairs that are set up against the wall by the door ( _which Kratos guesses must be standard fair for fancy castle suites, but wouldn’t know, because this is the only one he’s ever been in that he remembers_ ), sitting on the edge of it either because he’s nervous or because it’s just slightly too small for him. Malos wrings his hands nervously, like Anna would, but unlike Anna—who would be tracing the scars on her right hand—Malos instead rubs his thumb over the knuckles of his left. Belatedly, Kratos also notes this is the first time, he thinks, he’s ever seen Malos in long sleeves. Was he wearing them yesterday, too?

Now isn’t the time to worry about it, Kratos supposes. He isn’t very good at starting conversations, though, so he simply waits for Malos to speak.

“It’s just,” Malos says, after only a second or two searching for words. “I know it was, _technically,_ Anna’s decision. But I still feel bad, you know? About… never contacting you, and all.” He rubs his thumb, again and again, over his own knuckles. “Like I should have tried harder to change her mind.”

“Oh,” Kratos says, and then takes care to roll Malos’ words around in his mind before he comments on them. He doesn’t have to do that long at all, though. His thoughts on the matter are still fairly simple. “You don’t have to apologize, really,” he insists.

Malos sends him a look like _are-you-serious_. “Yeah I do,” he says, exasperated, tired. “Even if you ain’t mad about it. If I don’t apologize it’s gonna drive _me_ nuts.”

Kratos laughs, quiet and startled and fond all at once. Malos is a good man, really. “Well,” Kratos says, because it’s the least he can do, “I appreciate your apology, then.”

“…but you ain’t mad?” Malos asks, like he’s surprised.

Kratos shakes his head no, then reconsiders. “Perhaps a little,” he admits. Fifteen years a long time to be separated from his wife, from this portion of his family, never mind _Lloyd._ But. If he is angry, it is not Malos he needs to take it out on. So Kratos puts that aside and reaches for a different equally important truth. “The most I am sure of is that you are alive, and that’s not a gift I’m eager to throw away carelessly.”

Malos doesn’t say anything right away, which at first Kratos thinks is just because he’s trying to sort out how he feels about Kratos’ response. But then Kratos notes the shift in the ambient ether. It’s subtle, something Kratos probably only notices because he and Malos are diametrically opposed elements, but there’s a brief, increased output of darkness in the room. Kratos _really_ looks at Malos, then, takes in the way Malos grips his own hand tight, eyes squeezed shut in an expression that Kratos knows all too well. Grief, only just choked back from boiling point.

And it is then that Kratos realizes that… not everyone survived the blast that razed Anna’s village. They can’t have. Malos may have gotten a shield up, yes—as impossible as it was for that shield to _succeed_ —but Malos’ shield could have only covered ten people at best, and that’s _only_ if ten people had been immediately near him at the time. Did only the four people currently in this suite survive? Anna’s immediate family, and no one else?

( _Kratos thinks of Patroka, spitfire and always demanding someone spar with her. Thinks of quiet morning coffee shared with Sigurd as his siblings ran around outside under Mikhail’s supervision. How many died? How many lived? He knows Malik and his immediate family survived, but Kratos isn’t sure if he’s strong enough to find out about the rest._ )

The ambient ether shifts back towards normal. Malos breathes, and opens his eyes. He laughs, short and fond, even if a little forced.

“Still as much of a sap as you’ve always been, huh Kratos,” he teases.

For Malos’ sake, Kratos teases back. “Some things don’t change.”

Malos laughs again, then stops wringing his hands and leans back in his chair, casual if not wholly comfortable. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Kratos wonders if that’s the end of the conversation, or…

“You doin’ alright?” Malos asks, and the look he sends Kratos is curious, concerned.

Kratos chuckles helplessly despite himself, shaking his head. “Sure,” he answers, neither wholly truthful nor wholly _not_ truthful. He wonders, briefly, if _he_ should be asking Malos that question instead, but acknowledges that he probably isn’t the man to help Malos wade through his grief, just as Malos isn’t the man to help Kratos try and rationalize and cope with the knowledge that he is a reflection of the Architect. “Not ideal,” Kratos answers, more truthful. “But…”

Malos smiles, puts his hands up in surrender. “If you don’t wanna talk about it with me, that’s fine,” he says, proverbially stepping back. “I just… wanted to check in.”

“Thanks,” Kratos says, and means it. “I appreciate that.” He knows he doesn’t _have_ to explain himself to Malos, but decides to offer part of an explanation, anyway. “I really am… okay, mostly. It was just a long journey.”

“Yeah, I can imagine,” Malos says, letting out a long wheeze of a breath and running a hand through his hair. “I appreciate what you guys did, by the way. I mean, sure, I reestablished resonance with Anna almost immediately—and I love her, ‘course I do. But the freedom’s still nice, you know? The option.”

Yeah, Kratos can imagine. It must be.

“You should thank Lloyd,” he says, because it wasn’t like _he_ did anything to help rewrite the blade system other than punching himself in the face, which he doubts counts as _helping_. The two things were barely related. “It was his idea.”

“I will,” Malos agrees. His smile is soft, underpinned with guilt, just like Anna’s was, earlier.

“You should… probably apologize to Lloyd, too,” Kratos adds, after a moment. “He needs it more than I do.”

Malos lets out a long, slow breath, but he nods. “Yeah,” he agrees again. “Yeah, I do. I will. Dunno what exactly I’ll say, because the fact that Anna’s a brick wall who can’t be talked down form any decision, good or bad, isn’t really an excuse for why I didn’t just say fuck her decision and go looking for my grandson anyway, but…” Malos stops. Shakes his head. Runs a hand over his face. “Whatever. Can’t change the past just by wishing. Gotta live with the consequences of our mistakes.”

Yeah, Kratos thinks. That’s all they can do.

He feels bad for Malos, in a way. He wonders if it’s difficult, if it’s different, when you’re a blade, and what you want goes directly against what your driver wants. Is it difficult, attempting to undermine their wishes? If it is, would that absolve Malos of all blame?

It makes Kratos think about the Architect who made this system to begin with, which is the last thing he wants to do. So he takes his anger and he sets it aside. Maybe he _should_ be furious, on Lloyd’s behalf, but even if he was, what good would it do to take it out on Malos? What good would it do, when Malos is already well aware of his mistakes and well aware he has to face the consequences of them?

It wouldn’t really do any good, Kratos thinks, so he keeps his mouth shut.

“Anyway,” Malos says, patting at his knees and pushing himself to his feet. “Told Anna I’d go with her to the meeting for moral support, so I should go finish getting myself ready. Thanks for letting me talk.”

“Thank you for apologizing,” Kratos says, again, and Malos shakes his head all exasperated like he doesn’t think Kratos should thank him so casually for that. “I really appreciate it,” Kratos carries on, anyway, because he _does._

( _The fact that Anna and Malos both show clear remorse for their decisions, their actions? Well, it probably isn’t the_ only _reason Kratos isn’t furious, but it’s definitely helping._

 _Because, really. Finding out your wife is alive a week or so after finding out you’re a reflection of the man you once called god? That’s a relief, even if she was deliberately ignoring you for fifteen years. That’s a relief, and a well-welcomed distraction._ )

“If you need anything, let me know,” Malos says, as he starts to open the door. Then he reconsiders his words, laughing. “Or, I won’t be here. So let Jin know, I guess?”

Despite everything, Kratos is still fond. “I will,” he says. “Thank you.”

“See you later,” Malos says, ducking under the doorframe as he leaves, shutting the door behind him again.

Kratos hums shortly to himself once Malos is gone, debating to himself what he’s going to do now. The plan is still to at some point leave the room and go interact with people, which seeing as he’s as dressed as he’s going to get for the day, there isn’t anything _else_ he needs to do to get ready for that. Except…

The fact that there is no bathroom directly attached to the bedroom is really, truly, a terrible oversight in the layout of this suite, Kratos thinks to himself, as he mentally prepares to interact with _more people_ before he even gets the chance to go to the bathroom.

\- - -

What Kratos should have done, but didn’t do, is ask Anna how long her meeting was supposed to take. Then again, he doubts she would have had any real clue other than a general estimate, which is also all that Jin and Lora know on the matter. “A couple hours, but who knows, really, when it comes to something as serious as finalizing a _peace treaty,_ ” they’d said, and they’re right, Kratos knows. He doesn’t _remember_ how things like that went, centuries ago, when he was making a sorry excuse for a diplomat with Mithos and Martel. But it makes logical sense.

So, he should resign himself to not seeing Anna before tonight, probably. And then they’ll talk. In the meantime, he just has to stay successfully distracted, so the aching in his core doesn’t consume him completely.

Inconspicuously a he can manage, Kratos ducks his head down a little, gently tugging up the collar of his— _Anna’s_ —except it _was_ his— _the_ shirt he’s wearing, so he can smell it again. Maybe it’s silly. The reassurance she hasn’t stopped being alive just because she isn’t in the room is nice, though. He missed her. Missed this smell. Thought he’d never—

“Kratos, you aren’t _seriously_ going to let her get away with cheating like this, are you?” Jin asks, and the world snaps back into place around Kratos.

The table in main room of the suite, a wooden chair underneath him, his free hand holding a spread of battered cards in between his thumb and forefinger. The warm, yellow light filtering through the windows. Jin and Lora sit across the table from him—well, Lora _stands,_ at the precise moment—and Lloyd sits next to him. All eyes are on him, waiting for his response. Kratos blinks.

“What,” he says, at the same moment Lora leans towards Jin and demands: “ _You’re one to talk.”_

Kratos drops the shirt so his face isn’t buried in it, watching as Jin smiles ever-so-slightly and declares with all his coolness: “I would never cheat.”

“Jin I have known you long enough to know that is a lie,” Lora argues.

“It _is_ suspicious that you keep managing to pull out an ace every single round we play,” Lloyd agrees, and Lora sends an approving glance towards her nephew that’s only marred by the fond disbelief she’s currently regarding her father with. This old song and dance is it, then? Kratos smiles.

“I didn’t see Lora cheating,” he says, which is _true_ —he was much too preoccupied to have seen that—even though he knows she probably was and can’t blame her.

“She was so blatant about it, though,” Jin says, calmly, his tone edging into fondness as well.

“Like _having the ace of diamonds every round_ isn’t blatant?” Lloyd argues back, and it’s—interesting, just how easy it seems he’s fallen into this pattern, though there’s a fumbling edge to his tone like he cannot quite decide how smug he’s allowed to sound.

“It’s always the ace of diamonds,” Lora groans, and Lloyd looks much more relaxed now that his aunt is backing him up. “Jin, _come on_.”

“It’s just how the cards fall,” Jin insists. Lora groans indistinctly and Lloyd laughs, bright, like he’s been doing this his whole life. It fills Kratos to the brim with a chilly kind of nostalgia for something that never was, and he wonders who taught Lloyd to play cards, wonders if he’d play differently at all if he’d spent his whole life anticipating Jin’s quiet cheating and Lora’s blatant countermeasures. He wonders if Lloyd would have chosen to sit on the other side of the table, with an aunt or a grandfather he was just as familiar with as his own father, or…

It doesn’t matter. Wishing for a different past is nothing more than wishing, anyway, and Kratos knows this. So he neatly takes those feelings, ties them up with a bow, and chucks them delicately into the sea with the rest of the thoughts he has that are no use holding onto.

Things happened how they happened. He just has to live with it, make the most of it, as he has with every other—metaphorical and literal—hand of cards he’s been given before.

He wonders if Anna will be done with her meeting, soon. It’s been a couple of hours by now, anyway. Kratos knows, of course, that he doesn’t exactly have the right to hog up all her time until tonight, so he’ll have to wait even longer than that, but… Even still, he wants to see her again. He cannot hog up all her time, but what’s stopping him from at least being near her while she doles out her time to everyone else? He almost regrets not going with her to the meeting after all, but that regret is choked with the reminder of how many politicians he’d have to breathe the same air as in return. He wouldn’t have been able to stick it out this long with them, not even if it meant getting to watch Anna talk in all her passion and fervency for hours on end.

“Dad?” Lloyd asks, breaking Kratos out of his thoughts.

He was so distracted that he passed over his old hand of cards in and was dealt a new set somewhere in there without even consciously realizing it. His cards still lay face-down on the table. It… must be his turn. Oops. Kratos feels heat creeping up his neck, and only just avoids sinking down in his chair in his embarrassment. Usually he’s better than this.

“You okay?” Lloyd presses, gentle, his eyes only for Kratos at the moment. “You’ve been really spacey today, Dad.”

“Oh, don’t mind him,” Lora laughs before Kratos can even think about opening his mouth. “He’s always like this when he’s thinking about _Anna_.” Her grin is bright and knowing and needling—at some point she sat back down in her chair, which Kratos missed, too—and Kratos feels his face get hot with the rest of his blush. Dammit, Lora, that’s not fair.

Lloyd makes a face, his worry having evaporated and been replaced with… something else. Something that Kratos can’t read and isn’t thinking about, anyway, because Jin comes to his rescue by nudging Lora playfully.

“You’re one to talk,” Jin says, quietly, and Lora immediately turns so red her face is an easy rival for Kratos’, and _Lora_ isn’t glowing.

“Leave Haze out of this, _leave her out of this_ ,” Lora whines, turning her head away.

“Haze?” Lloyd asks, a half second before Kratos can think of asking the same question. Haze is not a name he knows. But then, it has been fifteen years. That’s plenty of time to make new acquaintances, especially if… Well.

Lora heaves a deep breath, and though she’s still blushing, there’s a smile she can’t quite keep her face now, and she doesn’t hesitate when she speaks. “My girlfriend,” she explains, and _Oh,_ Kratos thinks. “It’s been almost a month now, since I saw her last. But I’m _not_ as bad Jin’s making me out to be.”

Jin quirks one eyebrow, silently communicating _this emotion bleed says otherwise,_ and Kratos and Lloyd both laugh in the same breath, Lloyd just laughs louder.

“Oiii,” Lora whines, but she gives up, dramatically resting her arms on the table and laying her head across them. ( _Kratos files away this image for later, so he might remind Lora next time she insists that Anna’s the only one in the family who’s dramatic._ ) “Yes, yes, I miss her. Can you blame me? I’m worried, too. The resonance snapped—same time Jin’s did, so must’ve been when you lot were messing with the network,” she directs this last bit in Lloyd’s direction specifically, “so I’m sure she’s fine but it’s still weird without her where I can reach, at least with my heart if not with my hands.”

Kratos almost laughs at the metaphor. And they all call _him_ the sap?

“Oh, sorry,” Lloyd says, quietly.

“No, no, don’t be,” Lora insists, laughing. “It was a really _really_ good thing you did, I promise. Blades should have had a choice about resonance from the start, if you ask me.”

“It just means I have to put up with her _pining_ ,” Jin says, like it’s some great trial, though he’s smiling the whole time.

Lora reaches over and lightly shoves Jin, who chuckles—it might as well be a guffaw, for him—“Oh, knock it off, you’re fine.”

“You’re the one acting like it’s the end of the world because you haven’t seen her in a month,” Jin counters, without missing a beat.

Lora moans some more, and Kratos sees no reason to let her suffer, so he decides to back her up. “Believe me,” he says. “A month can feel like an eternity, when it’s spent away from someone you love. I should know.”

“Guess you would,” Lora says fondly. “Honestly, you and Anna were both _unbearable,_ with you in and out of town all the time as you were. I don’t know how you two…” And then she stops, abruptly. Draws her arms up, sits up straight in her chair. There’s an uncomfortable look on her face, and suddenly she can’t quite meet Kratos’ eyes.

Ah. It’s about that, isn’t it?

“Sorry,” Lora says, quietly, fiddling with her fingers. “It’s… fifteen years must have been such a long time… and I wouldn’t blame you if you couldn’t forgive us for not saying anything. It was just a busy—and Anna—” But Lora can’t commit to either excuse. She shakes her head, looking frankly miserable. “Well, there’s no use shoving the blame around,” she whispers. “The fact we didn’t tell you, Kratos. Or that we didn’t look for you, Lloyd. That’s…”

“Unforgivable,” Jin finishes, voice low, eyes fixed on the table.

“Yeah,” Lora agrees. “And if you can’t forgive us… We understand…”

“It’s fine,” Kratos answers, without even waiting a breath. “The fact that you are alive is enough for me,” he says, which is true.

“Y- Yeah!” Lloyd echoes, shakily, and Kratos suddenly wishes he’d let Lloyd speak first. Lloyd’s laugh is tight if not nervous, his smile unsettled on his lips. “I mean, better late than never, right?” he says. “It’s weird… and it sucks that I’m only just meeting you now… But I’d rather this than never getting to meet you at all. Really.”

Lora and Jin buy it, but Kratos knows his son better than that. Lloyd… definitely isn’t handling this well at all, Kratos thinks. But Kratos also knows it’s not something they can unpack at this precise moment, nor is it something he’s really even sure he could help Lloyd unpack later if he tried. Especially not until Kratos has had a lengthier talk with Anna. Especially not until Kratos feels more settled in his own skin.

If he tried to help Lloyd, right now, all Lloyd would get from him is bad help. So it would have to wait.

What Kratos _can_ do right now, though, is reach across the table for his untouched cards.

“Sorry, it was my turn, right?” he asks, and successfully changes the topic.

\- - -

Kratos kills time by cycling through card games, and then card game partners ( _especially once Zelos and Colette and Sheena and Seles get back from their castle exploration shenanigans_ ), and then once he’d hit his limit of how much intrapersonal interaction he could tolerate for a day, he nicked their other deck of cards from Seles and hid in Anna’s room while he played solitaire. He may have gotten a little distracted by how simple and yet how profound it was that he was _sitting on his wife’s bed, playing solitaire,_ but considering up until yesterday he had been quite certain his wife was dead, well. Even the little things feel monumental, in times like these.

Monumental, and somewhat dreamlike. The sound of Lora’s laughter through the door only feels real when it’s counterpoint to Seles’ indignant, delighted protests. Kratos keeps lifting the shirt to his nose so he can smell it again, greedily breathing in the reality of Anna, alive and well. At least no one can give him looks for it, now. Nor can anyone give him looks for draping the sheets across his lap—not because it’s cold, but because those smell like her, too.

Hours pass. There’s a knock on the door.

Kratos looks up and Anna’s already poked her head in.

“Can I…?” she begins, and Kratos laughs.

“It’s your room.”

Anna rolls her eyes, doesn’t enter. “Yeah, but I wanted to make sure you were like…? Wanted to make sure you didn’t wanna be left alone.”

“Well, I don’t want to be left alone badly enough to refuse you,” Kratos answers, with all of his sincerity. Anna laughs—more nervous and guilty than fond, but she lets herself in anyway, closing the door behind her. “How’d it go?” Kratos asks, and as Anna moves towards the bed, appends: “If you flop dramatically on my cards, I’ll be very sad.”

Anna hesitates. Sends him a look, cautious but eager. “Can I flop dramatically on your lap, instead?” she asks.

Damn it, does he love this woman.

“Yes,” Kratos tells her, and as soon as the word is out of his mouth Anna does as she said she would and flops dramatically across his lap. Kratos leans back so she has an easier time of it, though this still ends with her stomach across his knees and her face-first against the bed, which is going to be uncomfortable in about a minute, but Kratos doesn’t mind. “How’d it go?” Kratos repeats.

“Oh, fine,” Anna says, or at least Kratos _thinks_ she says, since it’s muffled by the bedsheets. She turns her head after a second though, propping it up on crossed arms and looking up at Kratos. It’s difficult to maintain eye-contact at this angle, but doable. “I mean, there wasn’t really a chance of it going _badly_ at this point, it’s all just. Logistics and stuff. But! Everything’s all sorted now—or at least, everything I had _my_ hands in.” She grins, wicked. “They’ve still got a bunch of legal horseshit to sift through, but that’s not _my_ problem.”

Kratos laughs, fond and happy for her all at once. “That’s good,” he says, and Anna grins even wider.

“What about you?” Anna asks. “How’s your day been?”

“Fine,” Kratos answers. “Keeping busy, playing cards.”

Anna raises her eyebrows at him, an expression that’s somewhere between disapproving and fond. “Alone all day, or…?”

“No, I played with Lora and Jin for a while,” he says, and Anna relaxes. He rubs his hand over her back absentmindedly, one part to give his hands something to do—not that they mind being idle so much—three parts just enjoying that he can, that she’s here. He wants… to do something more, say something more, but Anna tilts her head at him, a curious hum on her lips and her eyes speaking of distraction, so he lets her talk first.

“Out of curiosity,” she says, slow, and this sounds like a little more than idle curiosity, the gentle concern stirred into her tone as it is. “What’re you at right now, anyway?” she asks, and Kratos blinks, not following. “Scale of one to ten?” Anna clarifies.

Kratos blinks again, but the memories dredge themselves up fast enough for him to say “Oh,” before Anna can ask again. It’s been so long since he’s used the scale that he almost forgot about it, seeing as the last time he was actively using it was. Well. Fifteen years ago. It wasn’t something Mithos cared to learn, and there wasn’t _really_ a time or need to bring it up during those months he was traveling with Lloyd and everyone else. “Hm,” he says, to keep Anna’s attention, as he thinks it over.

On a scale where one is a normal day, five is a bad one, and ten is an active panic attack, well…

“A four?” Kratos guesses, but it immediately tastes wrong on his tongue. “A three, maybe. It’s hard to say.”

Anna laughs. “Yeah, I suppose we did scale it to an entirely different brand of bad brains. I told Malos that.”

That catches Kratos by surprise. “You… were talking to Malos about this?”

“A little, yeah,” Anna says, rapidly, her voice a little tight, like she’s edging into embarrassed. Kratos raises his eyebrows at her in silent question, but she shakes her head. “Look, don’t worry about why, I just—wanted to check in, you know, mostly. And a four’s… good. It’s good that you’re not having a completely horrible day, anyway.”

Kratos lets her have the subject change, nodding to himself as he hums in assent. “Again, a four’s probably not completely accurate,” he says. Normally a four comes with the start of a quiet, baseless paranoia that he can’t shake, but there’s no paranoia, now, just… exhaustion. It was probably closer to a two, up until Anna questioned him about it, also. Seems he does better if he doesn’t just think about the whole mess regarding the Architect, but it’s a difficult thing to _not_ think about. Still: “It’s… a bad day, but a completely different brand of bad than usual, so we don’t have to worry about any of my usual triggers.”

“That’s good,” Anna says. “Because I don’t wanna get up.”

Kratos laughs at that, good natured, knowing that she _would_ without any protest at all if he asked, but he doesn’t really want her to move, either. “That _would_ be a shame,” he agrees. He knows there’s still enough of the day left that he cannot consider her time completely his right now, but he carefully, deliberately traces his fingers down the curve of her back, just to see what it does to her.

Anna makes a sound in the bottom of her throat that’s like _music_ for how needy it is, then gets out: “ _Kratos_ ,” in a tone that’s both laughing and reproachful.

“Mm?” he hums in inquiry, even though he knows exactly what he’s doing.

“Don’t play dumb, you fucker,” Anna spits, lovingly, and Kratos laughs. He lets his hand rest on the back of her thigh, mostly still just relishing in the fact he _can._ It’s probably going to be a long time before the reality of her, alive and well, will stop taking his breath away. The way she’s pinning his legs will make this somewhat difficult, but he _wants_ to, so he bends down as well as he can and presses an awkward kiss to where the skin of her shoulder is exposed by her shirt, sliding his hand slowly upwards. Anna squirms a little, laughing. “Kratos, come _on_.”

And, he shouldn’t, but… Well aware of what the weight of her in his lap is doing to him, Kratos bites down his hesitation and says: “That can… be arranged.”

Anna squeaks and buries her face in the bed. Kratos _thinks_ he hears her mumble “ _holy shit_ ,” and then she pushes herself up on her elbows, twisting to look at him, her face caught between delight and disbelief, like she can’t quite make up her mind on which she’s feeling. “First of all that was awful,” she says, breathless, “second of all _Kratos, holy shit,_ I swear you weren’t nearly this bold fifteen years ago.”

“A lot changes in fifteen years,” Kratos counters, though privately he admits he’s only formulating comebacks so quickly because he spent these past months traveling with Martel.

Maybe he shouldn’t have said that, though, because Anna’s smile falls a fraction of an inch or two.

“A- Anyway,” she says, and Kratos half expects her to climb out of his lap ( _the way his knees are digging into her ribs_ must _be uncomfortable_ ) but she doesn’t, apparently content to stay here. “Listen. Later, alright? We’ve got plans right now, and I… I want to talk, first, anyway. Before we. Before sex is on the table.”

That’s not an unreasonable request at all, and a no is still a no, even if the no sounds like _maybe some other time,_ so Kratos says: “Alright,” and leaves it at that.

He’s a little surprised that Anna’s opting to talk first and act later, instead of the other way around like she always does, but only a little. After all, that’s the way sex between them has always been, hasn’t it? Long conversations before anything else, mostly to establish boundaries, but also just to make sure they’re on the same page, and…

Fifteen years is a long time, isn’t it? Plenty of time to end up on different pages.

So: “What plans?” Kratos asks, instead.

Anna rolls her eyes a little. “Lora was thinking about having a party, sort of,” she says.

Oh, right. “I heard her talking about that,” Kratos says, and privately thinks that he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to be involved.

Either Anna reads his current thoughts, or still knows him well enough, even after all this time, because: “I talked her out of it,” she says, and it’s hard to say if she sounds _disappointed_ or _grateful_ for that. “At least, for today. But there’s still cake and alcohol, if you’re interested, which like, _I_ am so even if you wanna stay in here I’m gonna go eat some cake.”

Kratos laughs. “I wouldn’t mind some cake,” he says. He’s been alone long enough he can handle a little more of interacting with just Anna’s immediate family, anyway, especially if Anna’s there. He’s spent too much of his time today in a different room than her, besides.

“Cool.” Anna pushes herself up off of Kratos’ lap, sitting next to him, her hand tracing his knee idly. “Though, uh, can I ask you to avoid the alcohol, maybe? I feel like the conversation I want to have is going to be difficult if either of us are even a little bit buzzed.”

“That’s fair,” Kratos says, and then hums. “If Lloyd’s invited, we’ll have to keep him away from the alcohol, too.”

Anna squints. “What for? I mean, sure, he’s probably not old enough to—” And then she stops, as she realizes, her eyes fixed on Kratos’ split core crystal. “Ohhhhhhh,” she says. “Well, fuck, maybe I should just talk Lora into holding onto the wine until tomorrow, then she can have a bigger party like she wanted and _you_ don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“That would be wonderful, actually,” Kratos admits, and he starts cleaning up the cards spread out on the bed. He doesn’t want to keep playing his game badly enough to not follow Anna.

“And here I thought you’d rather be glued to my side,” Anna teases.

“Politicians and large parties,” Kratos answers, “are the only two things I wouldn’t suffer for you.”

Anna laughs, loud and loving. She squeezes his knee once before she climbs out of the bed.

“Anna, wait,” Kratos says, before she gets too far.

She stops and looks at him, humming short in question. Kratos hesitates, busying his hands with jamming the cards back into their box. He… he probably shouldn’t ask, but it’s been on his mind all day. So…

“The locket?” he asks, quietly.

Anna’s expression first turns sour, then bright and self-assured. “Out of sight, out of mind, Kratos,” she reminds him.

Kratos scowls, thinking about demanding it back anyway, but… Begrudgingly, he admits that though he’s been worried about the _location_ of the locket, today’s been a lot easier without the constant, weighty reminder of everything the Architect is and who he is in relation to the Architect hung around his neck. He’s barely even thought about it at all, and he feels lighter for it. Still, he’s worried…

“I didn’t get _rid_ of it,” Anna interjects, like she read his mind. “I promise, it’s safe, I know where it is. You can have it back _later_ , alright?”

Kratos sighs. A quiet, selfish part of his brain whispers he’s not even really sure if he wants it back at all. He discards that thought immediately, and, “Alright,” he says.

“Now, come on,” Anna nods towards the other room. “Do you want some cake, or not?”

The answer to that question is: of course he does, so Kratos follows after her, stopping only long enough to shove the cards into his bag ( _he can give them back to Seles another time_ ) so they won’t get lost. Lloyd’s still hanging around, to Kratos’ surprise, as is Colette. Lloyd’s already in the suite’s little kitchenette, getting cake from Lora, which is where Anna gravitates almost immediately. Colette’s sitting on one of the two couches situated towards the center of the room, so Kratos moves that way—Anna knows to get him a slice of cake—and sits on the opposite couch, sending her a smile and a wave.

“Hi, Kratos,” Colette says, her smile soft and bright. Kratos almost wonders why she’s here, but knows that when she isn’t with Zelos, one would be hard-pressed to remove her from Lloyd’s side. So, really, maybe her presence here isn’t a surprise at all.

“Did you have fun exploring the castle, earlier?” Kratos asks, and Colette laughs, soft.

“Yeah,” she says, smiling in a way that must mean it’s true. “Honestly, it was a little underwhelming, but keeping Seles out of trouble was…” She hesitates for a second here as she searches for a word, and Kratos wonders if the word she might be hoping to find—or have in mind, but not want to share—might be along the lines of _stressful,_ especially considering the Aegises’ relationship with authority and the castle itself, but it’s not his place to know if Colette doesn’t want to share. “It was fun, overall,” Colette says, finally, and Kratos lets her leave it at that.

Colette doesn’t seem eager to keep talking about it, nor does she currently appear to have a question for him, so Kratos lets his eyes wander towards where Anna is, watching her and Lloyd have some kind of conversation in loud, disbelieving, laughing voices about the fact… Lloyd’s never had this, Anna’s favorite flavor of cake, before. He hears Anna say something, fake-indignant, about who _dare_ deprive him of the experience, and watches as the realization hits her, regarding _whose_ fault it is, technically, and wonders if maybe he should—

“Kratos?” Colette asks.

Kratos pulls his gaze away. “Mm?”

Now that Colette has his attention, she blushes, nervous. There’s a second, Kratos thinks, where Colette is going to say never mind and not say anything at all, but she swallows her fear and presses forward ( _much to Kratos’ pride_ ), though she traces the scars on her core crystal as she does so. “I was just wondering… Are you okay, Kratos? You’ve been a little… I mean, ever since we met the Architect…”

She’s the third person to have asked today. Kratos laughs, short and empty, even as she trails off like she’s answered her own question.

“I’m alright,” he assures her, though. “I really am. It’s just…” And he wonders if he should tell her, wonders how much. Not all of it. No, certainly not right _now._ But he can afford to share just a little, he thinks. Colette is preceptive. Likely she already knows some of it. “The Architect told me something, when he spoke with me alone, and I’m still… trying to process how I feel about it…”

“Mmm,” Colette says, in affirmation. “Yeah, I suppose—everyone’s had a strange time after all that happened, huh.”

“How are you holding up?” Kratos asks, knowing he can, here.

Colette doesn’t need him to elaborate, exactly. They both know he’s asking about Martel. Colette hums, slow, fingers still tracing the scars on her core crystal, her other hand gripping her knee as her gaze slides away from Kratos’ face. “Okay,” she says, and he wonders how forced the brightness in her tone is. “It’s weird, being alone. But I’m getting used to it, I guess. I miss her, but.” Here, Colette laughs. “I mean, I’m sure you do, too.”

Kratos nods, slowly. “I do,” he admits. And to himself, he admits he misses Mithos, as well, but Presea—and Genis, he supposes—are probably the only other people who share that sentiment with him.

“Anyway, hey,” Colette says, slowly. Anna and Lloyd are still talking avidly about cake in the kitchenette as Lora laughs brightly. “You don’t mind us being here, right? I understand if you want time alone with Anna…”

“Lloyd deserves time with her just as much as I do,” Kratos counters, easy. He knows that he will not have Anna’s undivided attention until tonight, and he’s okay with that. He can be patient. Especially for Lloyd’s sake. He makes sure to smile at Colette as well, gentle. “And I definitely do not mind you being here, either.”

Colette blushes, ducking her head down. “I’m… glad,” she whispers, with some difficulty. “I know Lloyd really wanted to spend time with her. And I did too, to be honest.”

“Oh?”

Colette raises her head just enough to send Kratos a somewhat conspiratorial look. “I mean, of course I just want to get to know her myself, but also? Martel wanted me to tell her what Anna’s like, since they never got to meet.” She almost _looks_ like Martel, when she smiles like that, but then the smile falters with all of Colette’s typical anxiousness and tendency to backpedal, which she’s getting better about, at least. “I mean, if that’s okay with you, I guess…?” she asks.

“It’s fine,” Kratos assures her. He thinks briefly about how Anna and Martel only never got to meet because Anna never told him she was still alive, but he bottles that thought up and tosses it out into the ocean of his mind, letting the currents take it away. Missed opportunities aren’t worth grieving over, Kratos knows.

“Okay,” Colette says, and by this point Anna and Lloyd have stopped losing their shit about cake and make their way over.

Anna asks with just an expression if she’s fine to sit, and Kratos nods, taking his plate from her as she sits down on his right. He considers his slice of cake with no surprise but some disappointment. He’s not very picky about cake, when it comes down to it, but on a list of cakes he doesn’t really think worth the time, funfetti is absolutely towards the top of said list. Of course, it’s also Anna’s favorite. They agree to disagree, just as they do about coffee.

Lloyd hands Colette her plate and makes to sit down next to Anna, and once Kratos realizes this he scoots over, knowing he has some couch space left on his free side. “Here, scoot,” he tells Anna, gently tugging her. “There’s enough room for Colette if we squeeze.”

Colette shoots him a look like she can’t decide if she’s embarrassed or grateful, but she’s never once turned down the chance to be pressed up against Lloyd’s side, now being no exception. She slips around the coffee table and sits down next to Lloyd, who sits pressed up to Anna like he wants to drink in every inch of her, which makes Kratos laugh as much as it makes his core twist. At least it’s not too bad of a squeeze, given that fancy palace suites such as this have large couches, apparently. ( _Though, given it being Anna and one side and no one else on the other, Kratos thinks he would have been fine, even if it had been a tighter squeeze._ )

“So, Mom,” Lloyd says, eagerly. “You were starting to talk about the cannons? How she destroyed ‘em,” he amends to Colette, sending her a bright smile, then turning back to his mother. “Come on, come on, I wanna hear it!”

“Okay okay okay,” Anna says, around a mouthful of cake, which unfortunately Kratos does not even find the slightest bit unattractive. She swallows and leans forward so she can better gesture with her fork without stabbing anyone, which in turn means her thigh presses more firmly against Kratos’, and she dislodges Lloyd somewhat from how he’d been leaning against her. ( _Kratos knows that if not for her need to be physically in contact with himself and Lloyd to reassure herself that they’re still here, Anna would have stood up to better tell the story._ ) “So, I don’t know exactly what happened to Sylvarant’s. You’ll have to ask Morag or Brighid, but from experience I know they won’t say shit. _However,_ rumor has it Brighid set the building on fire before even Morag warned people to get out if they valued their lives.”

“Oh,” Colette laughs, startled.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Lloyd echoes, grinning, as he finds a way to curl up against Anna’s side again, plate balanced on his knees so he only needs one hand to eat.

“Right??” Anna says. “It turns out not all politicians are absolute garbage.”

“And—you took care of Tethe’alla’s cannon, right?” Lloyd asks, while Kratos leans back and listens, content to observe rather than participate. He’s got cake to eat, anyway, though he has half a mind to put it down just so he can put his hands on Anna—but he _does_ want the cake, despite his misgivings about the flavor, so he settles for where their thighs meet and listening to her voice as it washes over him.

“I mean, yeah, it was a team effort,” Anna says. She sits up a little straighter—not that she can much without completely dislodging Lloyd, which she doesn’t seem eager to do—to judge where the rest of her family is, but gives up pretty quickly on what was probably an attempt to get one of them over to help her explain when she sees them chatting amongst themselves. “Me and Malos mostly just played distraction, because that’s what we’re good at, but—well, you haven’t met Jade, or Mythra, but they helped.

“And, uh, Jin and Jade are probably the two most powerful ice blades I have ever met?” Anna continues. “Jin is—and I mean, Haze is too, so I’m starting to think Lora’s just a magnet for them, not that explains _Jade,_ but _anyway_ ,” Anna pauses here to shovel a bite of cake into her mouth, though she at least swallows before speaking again. “Jin and Jade, powerful ice blades, you know, so they just—mean they froze the thing solid and then, I didn’t even see it, but.” Here, she pantomimes an explosion as well as she can with a fork in her hand. If Kratos had been sitting any further forward, she would have hit him in the face. “It was just. _Snow._ Afterwards. It was incredible.”

Kratos cannot actually see Lloyd’s expression given the way Anna’s currently sitting between them and the way Lloyd’s pressed up against her side, but he can hear the awe in Lloyd’s voice well enough. “ _Ohhhh_ , that sounds really cool? I’d love to see. Maybe Jin could give a smaller scale demonstration…”

Anna laughs. “Good luck, Jin hates showing off.”

“And spars,” Kratos adds.

“And even if he didn’t hate spars he wouldn’t show off during one, anyway,” Anna says. "And Jade just hates work, so."

“Awww,” Lloyd whines. Colette giggles. Having somehow already finished with his cake, Lloyd lazily reaches over and sets his empty plate on the coffee table, and with no fanfare at all flops into Anna’s lap, his head across her knees as he looks up at her eagerly, eyes shining. His legs swing into Colette’s lap, but she doesn’t seem to mind this one bit. “So, you said you ‘n Malos were a distraction, huh? You guys do that a lot?” Lloyd asks of his mother, like he’s burning to know everything he possibly can about this, about her.

Anna sends a fond, somewhat startled look down at her son, but doesn’t protest, instead leaning back again so that it’s a little more comfortable for him. Kratos notes that Colette, much like himself, seems perfectly content to sit to the side and absorb all this information without participating, letting Lloyd and Anna have their moment while still being privy to it.

“I mean, yeah,” Anna says, to answer Lloyd, laughing as she does. “That’s what we’re good at! We’re both loud and obnoxious, so it works out, y’know?”

Kratos thinks that honestly—though he knows his wife can be both loud and obnoxious if she wants to be—that Anna’s so good at being a distraction because she is the brightest star he has ever known, effortlessly demanding the attention in a room, drawing all eyes to her because in any and every circumstance she is always the most exciting, most beautiful thing to look at. He doesn’t… say that aloud, though. He hums, keeping it to himself, instead.

Anna knows, though. Somehow, she always knows when his thoughts get like this and he chooses not to say them. She tilts her head towards him, eyebrows raised playfully. “What’s that look for?” she asks.

“Oh, nothing,” Kratos insists, smiling back at her because her smile is contagious.

“No, come on, I know that look,” Anna protests.

Kratos raises his eyebrows, patient, trying to keep his smile from edging into smug, preferring to play the part of ignorance just because of how Anna reacts when he does.

“Do you?” he asks.

“Yeah, it’s your _I’m-thinking-something-embarrassingly-sappy_ face.”

“Ah,” Kratos says, and nothing more.

It’s fun watching Anna start to fidget then realize she can’t with Lloyd in her lap, her fork raised in lieu of a finger, mouth working for a moment. “Well,” she says, impatient. “Are you?”

“Maybe.”

“Tell me?”

The question’s gentle, curious, and had they been alone Kratos probably would’ve given up the act the moment it reached his ears, but…

“With Lloyd right there, I’d rather not,” he says.

Anna’s eyes flash, eager and knowing. “Later, then?”

“If you remember to ask me,” Kratos says, and he shrugs.

“Fucker,” Anna spits back.

“Love you too.”

It’s easy and wonderful, effortless in a way Kratos is quite relieved about, even though he hadn’t consciously been worried about there being any bumps in the rhythm between them, after all these years. But the rhythm is just as fluent as it used to be, like they’re still young, and nothing’s changed between them at all. Anna’s glare has no real bite and she can’t stop smiling at him, and Kratos returns it in kind with the quietest smugness he can offer, which is in turn disrupted only by how grateful he is that she’s here. Having given up on his cake by this point, Kratos rests both plate and fork in his lap and reaches up with his now-free hand to squeeze Anna’s shoulder, and she leans into the touch, and—

Colette giggles.

Blushing, Kratos pulls his attention away from Anna’s face, though he leaves his hand where it is. Colette’s very politely hiding her smile behind her hand, and Lloyd’s… literally, actually covering his eyes, his entire face buried in his hands. The sight makes Anna laugh, short.

“Lloyd?” she asks.

Lloyd groans and slowly drags his hands down his face. “What? I’m fine,” he answers, tight. “Really.” His eyes dart between his parents, like he cannot quite reconcile what he just witnessed, and Kratos isn’t sure if he wants to laugh or feel bad. “Uh,” Lloyd says, but seems to get lost the moment after.

Anna laughs again, not unkind. “What about you?” she asks, changing the subject for her son’s sake. “Tell me something about you, Lloyd. About—I dunno, where you grew up?” And then she busies herself with spearing another bite of cake, muscles tight like she’s trying not to be anxious. Kratos reaches up and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear as well as he can from this angle, hand slowly dragging down her neck and to her shoulder again once he’s done, hoping to soothe her.

“Oh!” Lloyd says, obviously much more comfortable with this topic, at least. “About Iselia? I dunno if there’s much to say—”

But he talks forever about it anyway, eager and bright, about Dirk, or about how he first met Genis, or about the woman he learned sword-fighting from—he goes on and on, and somewhere in there Anna passes her half-eaten cake to Kratos like she’s lost her appetite, and he takes it and his own and sets them on the coffee table. Anna interjects with polite, eager questions, of course, like nothing’s wrong. And she genuinely gets excited when Lloyd mentions school, because apparently the fact he was awful at it is something she finds wonderful, if only because she shares that with him. ( _Kratos doesn’t quite get it, but being a blade, he’s never really had to deal with school. From the look Colette sends him from across the couch, she doesn’t get it, either._ )

Lloyd doesn’t seem to notice anything, as caught up in talking as he is, but Kratos notices because Kratos knows Anna, knows the ways she curls in on herself and throws up masks to hide how gleefully her mind is lighting itself on fire. Even as she talks back to her son and swaps stories like everything is fine, her smile is too tight, her eyes fixed anywhere but Lloyd’s face, even as her hands keep busy by petting his hair with her left while he holds her right in his own, resting on his stomach.

These are the consequences for her actions. A lifetime that she missed, because she decided there were things more important than raising their son. A lifetime that she missed, offered to her in half-remembered stories, bright and painful all at once. And Kratos knows they are bright and painful, because they were when Lloyd offered them up to him, only it was not _his_ fault he didn’t get to see Lloyd grow.

Right now, there is nothing Kratos can do for Anna except squeeze her shoulder and anchor her as she wades through all her grief over a lifetime that she threw away.

\- - -

That night they settle into Anna’s room like it’s second nature, which even after fifteen years, Kratos supposes it still is. He doesn’t need to change his clothes, not minding if he spends the night in this shirt, and seeing as he never got out of his pajama pants to begin with this morning. Anna tells him immediately that she absolutely needs to get out of person clothes right now and to give her a second; Kratos laughs and lets her. He makes himself comfortable on the bed, turning on the bedside lamp before he settles in; back resting against a pillow propped against the fancy headboard, watching Anna as she undresses. He thinks about being cheeky and telling her not to bother getting dressed again at all, but swallows it, knowing she wants to talk and knowing that that’s going to be impossible for the both of them if she doesn’t have a shirt on.

It’s fascinating, really. The ease with which she shimmies out of her shirt one-armed, the way she yanks her bra off over her head with her left hand, right arm only moving as it must to be rid of the offending articles of clothing, hand hanging mostly dead from lack of need. She makes it look as effortless as… well, as it probably must be, after fifteen years of doing this twice a day. Some might say it’s such a pointless, unremarkable thing to watch in such earnest, but Kratos watches anyway, watches and thinks it remarkable just because it’s Anna, because he loves watching her, because he’s still drowning in the fact he _can._ She trades pants for a loose pair of gym shorts— _not_ what she was wearing last night, but for all Kratos knows those are still in the bathroom—and then bends down to retrieve Kratos’ discarded shirt from yesterday. Kratos laughs to himself as she puts it on.

“What?” Anna asks, daring him to start shit, as soon as she has it tugged down over her face. She pauses for a second to tug at the collar and sniff at it, and that and the expression she makes after she does it is more than enough to fill Kratos’ chest to bursting with warmth.

“Nothing, nothing,” Kratos says.

She shoots him a look, a glare with no venom. “You’re one to talk.”

“I know,” he answers, smiling easy, unashamed. He pats the bed next to him, before she can ask, because it’s silly to make her go through the trouble of saying it when he knows it’s coming and also knows what his answer is. “If you want to sit…”

Anna hesitates a moment, her smile cautious, shy and delighted all at once. “Yeah, alright,” she says, and climbs into bed. Kratos made sure to leave enough room that she could sit next to him, if she wanted to, but she chooses to sit at the end of the bed instead, facing him, which makes _sense_ even if he’s a little disappointed. He slides his leg over so his ankle is pressed up against her hip, the skin of her thigh flush with his calf, knowing that she doesn’t mind if he initiates contact without asking, and needing— _wanting_ —to feel her here. For a brief moment, he wishes he wasn’t wearing pants, but.

“This won’t be too distracting, will it?” Kratos asks, just to make sure. There’s a reason she sat over there, after all.

“What? Oh, no,” Anna tells him, easy.

Idly, she reaches down with her left hand ( _of course it’s her left, because when she is on his left, it is the hand closest to him, but it’s still funny how hyperaware he finds himself now, tracking which of her hands is the good one and which isn’t_ )—she reaches down and pushes his pantleg up just a little, so she can trace the ether lines on his ankle and the lower part of his calf, knowing she’s alright to do so because he initiated contact first, and this is very rarely a thing he minds her doing. He loves the gentle way her fingers drag against his skin, soft and adoring, an outlet to keep her restless hands busy by giving them something concrete to do. His breath catches a little at the sensation as she repeats it, heart fluttering in his chest and starved body _aching_ for so much more. It’s funny, how little effort it actually takes her to completely unravel him. This might actually be more distracting for _him_ than it will be for her, but Kratos is confident that once Anna starts talking he’ll be ( _mostly_ ) alright on focusing on her words instead of her touch.

Speaking of.

“Anna?” he asks, because she’s not even looking at him, expression far away, probably because she got so distracted thinking about what she was going to say that she forgot she still needed to say it, which she does, sometimes.

She blinks, shakes her head, then draws her attention back to him. She smiles in apology, half-hearted—but she doesn’t look _nervous,_ exactly. She just looks resigned, mostly guilty, mostly tired. Kratos wishes she wouldn’t, wishes he could take her face in his hands and kiss the guilt out of her, but the best thing he can do to help her right now is to let her talk, so he raises his eyebrows in silent press for her to continue.

“Right,” Anna says, dark eyes reflecting the lamplight from behind Kratos. She studies his face, fingers still tracing the ether lines on his calf, as she pulls together words. “I just. I think we need to talk, you know? About…” She swallows. Doesn’t speak, right away. Unusual, for her.

“About what?” Kratos prompts.

Anna shrugs, helpless, face screwed up with all her guilt. “ _You know_ ,” she says. “Me vanishing on you? For _fifteen years_ —and then choosing not to say anything?” Her voice is high and tight, her hand has stilled, resting against his leg but not moving. “Because that’s- that’s fucked up.”

“I suppose it is,” Kratos admits.

Clearly, that wasn’t the reaction Anna was expecting. She stares at him a moment, makes a face as she tries to find new words to better articulate herself. “I mean I know- I know I already apologized for all that, but I wanted to do it again, and I. I know.” She swallows, rambles as she keeps going: “I know what you said last night, but I wanted to double _double_ check that this is… fine, you know? That… we’re fine.”

Her hand is still, but she still needs to _move,_ so her leg—the one not pressed against Kratos—fidgets instead, ankle pinned under her other leg and knee bouncing against the bed, her expression uneasy as she waits for Kratos’ answer.

The only reason it takes him a moment to find because he’s trying to figure out how to best reassure her.

“We’re fine,” he says, gentle, eyes fixed on her even as she flinches, turns away. “I still love you, Anna,” he says, and it’s the easiest thing he’s ever said. “That hasn’t changed.”

Her mouth twitches, she sends him a look like she thinks he’s being _unfair_. “That’s—I feel like. Like it _should_ have,” she argues, miserable. “Like things shouldn’t just be- just be _fine_. Like this should have fucked up something irreparably, so that it- that it _hasn’t…_ ”

“Is that not a good thing?” Kratos asks.

The look Anna sends him is still miserable, edging into frustration.

“It _is_ ,” she says, firmly. “I just…”

She pulls her hand away from him, then, sets it in her lap, clutching at it with her other. She stares at her clutched hands instead of Kratos, stares at them and—ever so slightly—scoots to her right so she isn’t touching him any more at all.

“I don’t feel like I deserve it,” she whispers.

“Deserve what?” Kratos asks, bewildered, concerned. “Good things?”

Anna shakes her head, gentle, still not looking at him.

“Forgiveness,” she answers to her lap, quiet.

The word hangs in the air for a long, long moment. Something about it feels a little bit like a punch to the gut, and Kratos fumbles, breathless in a way that’s entirely uncomfortable, searching for words but unable to find ones that feel in any way _adequate_ to counter such a fear. He clutches his own hands together, ether boiling restlessly under his skin, works his mouth but—Anna gets tired of the silence before he can quite piece together a thought. She gets tired of the silence and she huffs, she shrugs, exaggerated and desperate.

“You should be— _furious_ with me? I think?” she says, voice cracking over it, tone pitched upwards in the uncertainty that makes her muscles tight, makes her avoid looking at Kratos.

“But I’m _not_ ,” Kratos argues, as gentle as he can.

Anna shudders where she sits, hunched like a clenched fist. She sends a cautious glance up at him, face contorted with her disbelief. “ _How_?” she asks, like it doesn’t make sense to her at all.

Kratos fumbles a second again here—and there is rarely a time where he doesn’t at least a little hate how slow his mouth is to work, but it’s always at the important times like these where the silence that stretches out between them feels like an unforgiving eternity when it really is only the few extra seconds it always takes him compared to everyone else to put a thought into order. At least Anna is patient, in this. At least Anna will appreciate the fact he’s thinking it over, and not just giving the first, careless words that come into his mind.

“Because,” Kratos says, slowly. “Because the fact that you are alive and here and… and _sorry_ for what you did… That is a million times more important to me than anything else.” He wishes she were sitting a little closer, so he could hold her close, run his hands through her hair, but—he knows how easy it is for her to get distracted, knows how much of a distraction he and his body are for her. His words will have to be enough, right now. “The rest doesn’t matter,” he tells her.

Somehow, that was the wrong thing to say.

“It _still matters,_ Kratos,” Anna spits back, somewhere between frustrated and, perhaps, legitimately upset. “Fifteen years— _fifteen years!_ That you suffered and grieved over a wife you never actually lost, because she was a dumbass and she- and I- I never once _contacted you_ —”

“You had your reasons,” Kratos interjects, because she seems to be losing her thread of thought.

Anna just shakes her head, though, shakes it and shakes it. “Not a single reason I had can _excuse_ what I did, Kratos! Fifteen years of suffering, for no reason, because- because of thin excuses and indecision and- and- _we didn’t even get to raise our son, Kratos!_ ” She jostles her legs and furiously wrings her hands with all her pent-up energy, all-but screaming in her despair. “He- he _grew up without us!_ He calls another man ‘dad’—!”

“I don’t mind that so much,” Kratos says, with a quiet shrug. ( _Dirk has just as much right to the name ‘dad’ as Kratos does, maybe more._ ) “I’m not mad with Dirk.”

“Of course you’re not mad with Dirk! Dirk did nothing wrong! But I- _I_ —” Anna breaks off here, mouth working with a hatred it takes her a moment to articulate, tears of frustration burning in her eyes. “ _I did everything wrong!_ I let Lloyd slip away from me and didn’t once look for him or tell you so you could look for him or- or- _fifteen years, Kratos!_ ” She slams her hand against her knee, trembles where she sits, like a pot that’s boiling over. “Fifteen years of me actively choosing not to contact you, not to find Lloyd— _fifteen years_ of actively choosing any and every option that _wasn’t one of the two of you_. That’s not- That’s— _How do you not hate me for that_?”

Kratos flinches away from the implication that he could _ever_ hate her, even though… she’s right, isn’t she? That this is fucked up, what happened was fucked up, and she deserves at least a little bit of his anger…

But.

Kratos notices, _really_ notices, the way she is holding herself right now. One hand in her lap, the other squeezing her knee, fidgeting and very deliberately not touching him even though—he knows how to read her, and he can tell she wants to. But she’s choosing not to. Choosing not to, even though he’d be more than happy if she did, right now. Her eyes are red-rimmed and filled with frustration, with loathing, and in both of these things there is a plea, and suddenly Kratos understands, and he doesn’t like it at all.

“You… want me to hate you,” he says, slow.

“I think it’s weird that you don’t!” Anna answers.

Kratos considers his wife for a few moments, then nods, slowly, having made up his mind. “I think… I think you hate yourself enough for the both of us, right now,” he tells her.

“So? That doesn’t mean you can’t hate me,” Anna says, and she says it like she’s reassuring him, or maybe pleading with him. “You’re _definitely_ allowed to hate me.”

Kratos shakes his head, simple. “What good would me punishing you any more do?” he asks of her. “You’re punishing yourself enough.”

“It’s- it’s not about _punishment_ ,” Anna insists, but it’s a pretty flimsy insistence, given the way she fidgets and wrings her hands together, given the way her eyes keep flicking over him like she wants him and then away like she’s ashamed of that. He never said she couldn’t touch him. _She_ decided she wasn’t allowed. “It’s about- I mean- I don’t want you to just fucking _sweep this under the rug!_ ”

That’s… fair, actually, but.

“I’m not sweeping it under the rug,” Kratos argues.

Anna sneers. “Except when you say it’s fine, and- and you aren’t mad—”

Kratos shakes his head again, shoulders straight and determined. “I didn’t say it was going to be easy,” he tells her, patiently. “I didn’t say we could just… pick up where we left off, like nothing happened. We probably aren’t going to be able to do that. But that doesn’t mean we can’t start again _somewhere_.”

Anna scoffs, unkind. “Oh, yeah, sure! Like we can heal this big old mess with one ‘ _I’m sorry_ ’ and then some sex.”

“I’m…” Kratos scowls, knowing that she is only being like this because she is upset—at herself, it seems, not with him—but still feeling the blow of her words like a knife in his heart. “I wasn’t implying that,” he argues, as patient as he can.

“You’ve been acting like it all day,” Anna shoots back and.

Ah.

Kratos swallows. There’s nothing he can do here but apologize.

“If I was… making you uncomfortable,” he begins, but only gets that far before Anna backpedals.

“It’s- no, I mean,” she stammers. “That’s not quite what I meant.”

“Still, I admit I was being selfish,” Kratos continues, regardless, because he was. “Mostly wanting it for a distraction from… from the Architect bullshit.” He hates saying it, but at least Anna groans like she hates being reminded of it just as much, which is a relief in some way. “But… _Some_ of it was just… Just wanting to celebrate that you’re here, alive, in every way I can.”

The light is too dim and the distance between them too great for him to see a blush on her dark skin, but she turns her head away like she always does when she’s blushing, anyway.

“No, no,” Anna says, fondness briefly overruling the frustration in her voice. “That makes sense, and that’s fair, and you’re _allowed_ to ask, I just— It felt too much like you were trying to pretend nothing was wrong each time, a little bit, and I couldn’t- I can’t fucking handle that. Because everything _is_ wrong.”

Kratos disagrees, there, but that’s less important than:

“If you want me to stop asking, I can do that, and wait until you think you’re ready,” Kratos says. It’s that simple.

Anna puts her face in her hands, and is quiet for a long, long moment. She exhales. Then she nods.

“…that’d be great, yeah, I think,” she mumbles. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Kratos assures her. “I only request that you don’t put it off forever, as some self-inflicted form of punishment.”

Anna laughs, watery, a little offended, but: “Yeah, that’s fair,” she says. “Um. Talk to me about it in a week if I haven’t brought it up before then?”

“Alright.”

Anna rubs at her face, then drops her hands back into her lap. “Anyway. Where was I?”

“Trying to insist that you’ve completely fucked up our relationship beyond repair, which is untrue,” Kratos says.

“That’s- I don’t think I was _quite_ insisting that,” Anna protests. She fiddles with her hands again, left thumb tracing over her scars, eyes studying that instead of Kratos’ face. “I just… I don’t get why you aren’t mad at me. It feels wrong, that you aren’t mad at me. I feel like you should hate me.”

Kratos’ core makes a valiant effort to drop to his toes. He really wishes she’d stop saying that. “I could _never_ hate you, Anna,” he insists.

She shrugs. “Then you should at least be mad.”

Kratos wants, more than anything, to tell her again that he isn’t, but what Anna really needs right now is his honesty.

“…I am mad,” he admits, because he is. “And I’m hurt,” he adds, because he is. Fifteen years is such a long time, fifteen years with no legitimate excuse, softened only by her grief and the fact he knows they have easily twice that time stretching out before them. “But I don’t… see the point taking it out on you,” he says, gentle, because that’s also true.

Anna makes a noise, desperately frustrated. “And then—then it feels like nothing’s wrong!” she argues, like she’s hitting her head against this wall and can’t get past it. “Like there’s no _consequence_ —”

“You cannot ask me to punish you, Anna,” Kratos counters.

If he were to get angry, to yell, like she wants him to… if he were to give in and hold a grudge, hold all this against her… what would it fix? There is healing in being honest, yes, but it’s not like him refusing to scream at her is being dishonest. His mind is already made up. Her being alive is a greater treasure than the pain of her absence, and…

He knows Anna. He knows how easily, how willingly she will destroy herself—accidentally or otherwise. Are the past fifteen years not proof of that?

If he were to hurt her, like she wants him to… what would that heal?

Anna lets out a long breath, and: “I know,” she whispers, which is a relief. “I know.”

Kratos takes a breath of his own, sorting silently through the rest of his thoughts, his feelings. Quietly, privately, he wishes he could touch Anna again, slide his leg just a few inches to the left and press it up against her thigh again, but—it feels like there’s a gap he’s not allowed to cross, because would that not violate the silent ( _if somewhat silly_ ) boundary she has set? And even if she could probably use the physical reassurance despite denying herself of it… he wants _her_ to make the decision, wants _her_ to decide to do it, because that should be a thing she decides, not him.

So he remains very still where he is, hands folded in his lap, dragging his thumb across the other as he finishes rolling words around in his mouth.

“And… there are still consequences,” he tells her, quiet. “You know that, Anna. You saw them all day. Things that aren’t as comfortable as they used to be, between us. Experiences we didn’t share. A million and one things we don’t know about our son. That’s… plenty of suffering, without me adding any more onto it.”

Anna fidgets where she sits, but doesn’t argue. “I guess so,” she says.

“We will both grieve, Anna, maybe for the rest of our lives, for those fifteen years that we could have lived but didn’t get to,” Kratos continues, with a small shrug. “And I can’t… possibly imagine what that grief feels like, from your end, when you know there is no one to blame but yourself.”

And perhaps that is too mean, especially given how Anna withers under the words, but she looks like she thinks she deserves that. Kratos presses on.

“But I know… I know the thing about grieving a lifetime that you never got to have… You can sit around and wish for things to have gone differently, perfectly, all you want. But it’s not going to change the past. All it really does is make it hard for you to appreciate what you _do_ have,” he insists. He sends Anna a smile across the gap that separates them, gentle. “And the fact that you are alive, and here—that’s a gift I’m not exactly eager to throw away.”

( _He’s said that before, hasn’t he? Well, it’s still true, and there’s not really a better way to phrase it._ )

Anna looks up at him, cautious.

“…yeah?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he replies.

Anna considers him a moment more, then tilts her head, lips pulling into a smug smile. “A gift, huh?” she asks, fond and teasing.

Kratos nods, refusing to be embarrassed. “The only one I can think of more precious is Lloyd, but that’s not… really a fair comparison. The both of you are precious in different ways.”

Anna laughs, exhausted and loving, and it’s beautiful. Kratos grins. Even if it’s brief, even if her laughter tapers out when weighed down by her exhaustion, the momentary delight is worth it.

Anna runs her hands over her face again, drops them into her lap, shoulders slumped like she’s too exhausted to even fidget.

“I still don’t think I deserve it, though,” she whispers. “Your forgiveness.”

Kratos swallows the weight of that. “Well,” he says. “Maybe that’s your punishment, then. Being forgiven.”

Anna blinks. Looks up at him.

“Hey,” she protests.

Kratos raises his eyebrows.

“What?”

“You can’t do that…” Anna begins, scowling.

“Can’t I?” Kratos asks. “I’m the one doing the forgiving, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Given how much you seem to want me to hate you, I think the obvious answer here is to love you louder out of spite,” Kratos says, simply.

Anna makes a noise, expression twisted like she doesn’t like this but she doesn’t hate it, either, like she’s caught and reluctantly giving in. “Oh, come on,” she tries to protest, but it’s half-hearted, all her bottled frustration gently leaking out of her.

“And forgive you,” Kratos insists, just so that’s absolutely clear. “Because I do.”

Anna fidgets, now, makes an expression like she wants to smile but can’t quite. “Yeah, yeah, I know, and I’m _glad,_ but,” she says, leg bouncing against the bed again as she wrings her hands together. “But you know how my brain is, you know? How it took me months before I was fully convinced you trusted me. Before I was convinced you could _love_ me. Like I know- I know you do but there’s still that little voice in the back of my head like. You shouldn’t. Like you’re mad, even though you aren’t _saying_ it, but you are, and you _should_ be, and—”

“Anna, _Anna_ , please,” Kratos interjects, because if he lets her she’ll keep going like that for the rest of the night.

“I know,” she says, miserable. “I know, I’m just gonna dig myself a hole here if I keep going. I just.”

She breaks off. She doesn’t say more. She keeps fidgeting.

Kratos breathes, slow and careful.

Patience, at least, is something he’s always been good at.

“Well,” he says. “Again: I promise I’m not mad at you. And we could keep going back and forth on that all night, or you could come over here and let me kiss you until I’ve convinced you otherwise.” He hesitates here, and then appends, just to be sure: “…if kissing is still on the table, that is.”

Anna considers him a moment, and then laughs, bright and fond and tired.

“Yeah, sure,” she tells him. “Sex is the only thing that isn’t I think.”

“Well get over here, then, and stop denying yourself nice things like _touching me,_ Anna,” Kratos says, fond. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“I- I am not,” she protests, even as she climbs across the bed to meet him. Kratos grins despite everything, as she slots herself into his arms and curls up against his chest, running his fingers through her hair as he presses a kiss to her crown, drinking every inch of her warmth as she presses her body up against him.

“You were so loud about wanting to touch me that I’m surprised you didn’t wake the whole suite,” Kratos teases.

“Hey!”

“At least Malos, then.”

“Implying we don’t know how to keep the emotion bleed to ourselves!!”

Anna’s wiggled out of his iron-tight grasp enough that she can better glare at his face, her hands looping around his neck, her knee flush against his hip. Kratos grins back at her, because that is not the glare she glares when she’s seriously upset, it’s the one she glares where she’s fond but she’s mad about it, and it is the cutest, most wonderful thing he’s seen in a long time. He missed her so much.

He leans in and he kisses her until they’ve both forgotten about everything else.

**Author's Note:**

> i have a.... [Notes Doc](https://rarsneezes.dreamwidth.org/21659.html)........ if you're interested in reading misc plotting thoughts for tthis fic
> 
> and also [here's](https://rarsneezes.dreamwidth.org/21188.html) the offscreen anna+malos converastion that happened in the middle of scene two that anna then references in scene four. it's just the dialogue bc i'm too lazy to make prose out of it. but it's good and important.


End file.
